Every state has a regulator for insurance products. If there are problems and you want to address them, that should happen as close to the people as possible, not in a one-size-fits all central bureaucracy that believes it can control all. And of course, back in the guilded age I lived thru but am clueless about, the INDIVIDUAL had the ultimate power: one could ditch the fundie employer and/or the crass insurance company. Not so easy now. Some markets (and I use that word loosely) have but a single insurer.

Obamacare is ultimately going to prove unworkable, as evidenced by the ad hoc and chaotic delays, changes, and demands that the Obama administration is making almost on a daily basis. The only question is how much suffering and expense is it going to take before that's acknowledged, and what's going to replace it.

A) This is supposedly about health *insurance*. Insurance is for contingent, unlikely, but potentially costly events. Contraception is none of those, being completely knowable, 100% predictable, and inexpensive.

B) In the olden days, by which I mean pre-Obamacare, you could indeed "pick and choose" what procedures and medications your policy would cover. It's the central conceit of Obamacare that Big Fed knows best and is going to make sure you get it, pounded down your gullet if necessary.

Contrast that with the experience at the Los Angeles Unified School District. After distributing take-home iPads at some schools (to be used for taking standardized tests, digital books, classroom notes, homework, etc.), the kids discovered how to defeat the protections that kept them from being general-purpose tablet devices, and proceeded to use them for gaming, social networking, etc. The schools demanded them back and only two-thirds were returned. LAUSD didn't yet know how they were going to handle that, since so many of its families are poverty-stricken and, many being illegally present, don't exist in the financial world for LAUSD to go after the money. Last I heard, the schools still had the ones it got back locked in a closet somewhere, and LAUSD had delayed indefinitely the rollout of iPads to more schools.

By all accounts, there was some testing done, however inadequate. Thing is, the system utterly failed that testing and THEY DEPLOYED IT ANYWAY. If you're going to ignore the testing, why even do it? Just throw open the doors and hope for the best. Which is what they did, apparently.

This doesn't affect the nation at large the way a split would do, but there's a California group that's just gotten approval to start gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would create an Assembly district for every 5,000 residents, and a Senate district for every 10,000 residents. They wouldn't all go to Sacramento, but rather themselves designate from among their number the same number of representatives (80 Assembly, 40 Senate) for each legislative body as we currently have. The advantages are said to be a kneecapping of special interests' ability to influence elections, a drastic reduction in the amount of money needed to get elected, and a much more diffuse and responsive legislature. Additional details via the link. I haven't made my mind up about this, but it's an interesting idea.

A couple of us just rescued some 20-year-old data that had been stored on 3.5 inch floppies. We actually had to go to one of our old retired colleague's houses because he was the only person we could find who had a computer with a floppy drive capable of reading them. Even so, some of the data was unrecoverable.

I know probably the best option right now for preservation in digital form would be several copies on CD/DVDs of the proper archival type, but I'm wondering if there are any free online services such as Amazon Web Services (which has free accounts for limited usage) where there'd be a prayer they'd keep it around for decades. After all the stuff that Google has abandoned over the years, I'd never count on them, but is there anyone else who might be any better?

Labor and capital can be visualized as occupying the two sides of a seesaw. As you increase the utilization of one, the other will become less utilized. With labor becoming increasingly expensive, business will naturally do its best to replace it with capital (i.e. equipment), because that's the most cost-effective route. The only way to stop that from happening is to somehow drop the cost of labor, and I don't see how that's possible in today's political climate other than to have government subsidize it. There'd be a lot of pushback against that from both sides of the political spectrum ("Don't subsidize evil corporations!", "Don't prop up crappy business plans!"), so I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future.l

If you are entitled to a subsidy, the website is the only way to get it. Direct applications to insurers won't receive one.

When party A thinks what party B did was an extremely bad idea and very harmful to the country, is it logical or even realistic to expect it just to shrug its shoulders and help out?

If people can't tell if something is red vs pink vs brown vs green, then if this goes into widespread use where they have to be able to distinguish colors in order to answer the questions, they'll be screwed.

... is "the maintaining of prices at a certain level by agreement between competing sellers". Switch sellers to employers and prices to wages, and you've got what this agreement is, and it should be just as illegal.

Unless Congress does it, that's called a "gift of public funds" and is, for obvious reasons, illegal.

A more interesting question is why many of the major beltway tech companies one would expect to find attached to a huge government tech project aren't present. My suspicion is that when they saw the specs (or maybe the lack or vagueness of them) and the due date, they declined to participate.

Even assuming that to be true, fixed by when? The law has hard-coded dates in it, and insurers have vast sums at stake predicated on the numbers and types of people signing up, the premiums they'll get, and the subsidies they'll receive. If things slip, lawsuits will fly and it's logical to assume that taxpayers will be on the hook for damages. Not to mention the people who are losing their coverage at work who were expecting to be able to sign up via the exchanges. This disaster has knock-on effects that will resonate thru all sectors of the economy and society, and to call them 'teething problems' is far too dismissive.

.... that this kind of dependence on government funding means that government will increasingly assert control over where and how research will be conducted in the future, and how (or whether) results will be reported? If your project's existence depends on a particular paymaster, are you really going to jeopardize it by angering him? Maybe you're okay with the present party in power, but if you give government this kind of control over your funding, sooner or later people with opposing ideas are going to be in charge and will use those same levers in ways you won't be happy with.